Objects obstrcuting line of sight?

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

Greetings,
I am more curious then anything. Why does Eve’s physics not account for objects / collide-ables like stations, asteroids when it comes to weapons hitting targets or even warp destabilizes? If I am in an asteroid field could I not use cover to avoid gankers for example? The reverse is already true if I get stuck to close to objects I bump and get killed.

Same for fleet tactics. Hiding behind objects for cover? Ender Style? Go Nova. Sorry Can’t help it.

Would that over complicate combat and maneuvering? Or add more depth to the game? Or just flat out really impossible to implement?
Thanks
Adamant

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2

Processing requirements for thousands of objects would melt your experienced performance first and the server vault next.

REDNES

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3

Lots of 3D linear equations and intersection problems. And we’re talking about interpreted Python running on VM’s.

Never mind that the problem is being solved by the underlying libraries right now, since the game already knows how to show you obscuration when objects are behind or in front of each other. But that is a function of the shrink wrapped libraries.

4

Thanks both for the replys. So hopefully one day in the future. LOL. Maybe with something like Unreals Nanite Virtualized Geometry which, from my limited understanding, would solve those issues?

5

The idea itself is interesting. But I think it would work in other games with a different ship perspective and control - and is not well suited for Eve because:

I think it might make large fleet battles near impossible. Instead of focusing on shooting the enemies you would have to focus on not shooting your allies.

Even if you aim very carefully your target can move in unexpected ways. It would be easy to hit other players and get an accidental Concord response. In PVE it make it more likely to shoot triggers and pull the wrong waves. Or accidentally shoot your own wrecks and loose your loot or a mission critical item. Because no matter how good you position your ship - your guns track and cycle on their own, and your missiles will fly their own path to targets… And then there are the ‘smart’ AI control of your drones in Eve, hehe. They will have a field day shooting other objects.

It would complicate area of affect modules and weapons. Do objects/ships that are in the way block boosts? (for that matter will it block remote repairs?) What about stealth bombers with bombs? I wonder how complicated the bomb and smartbomb blast geometry and damage calculation will get.

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6

You have solid well thought out points. Thank you.
One suggestion would be to implement it in small increments. Add some collision detection here, see how it impacts some modules. If it is on the road map its a long way off but would be cool.

Thanks for entertaining the mental floss.

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I am very strongly in favor of this.

8

Python should Go. (Pun intended).

That’s to trap you into the metaverse.

The only thing we really need to obstruct in Eve, is those blue suns.

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That’s client side. I don’t want my weapon calculations determined client side.

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Just as complicated as shadow calculations, it will probably be done as a shadow map, rather than ray tracing.

Edit: Cue the billion complaints about hit boxes

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@Dredwerkz There are already weapons with simple collision detection ingame. Doomsday lances and reapers. So the mathematics are quite possible. There is also collision detection involved in ship bumping, or bouncing off / getting stuck on background objects ingame already.

However, my main concern in my previous post was that I’m worried how it will affect current gameplay because of hitting wrong targets. The positioning of your ship relative to your target and any obstacles/others will become very important, and in some situations extremely complicated. I’m not even sure how fleets with heavy TIDI could cope with it without accidentally blowing up more of their own fleet than enemies.

A smaller concern for me was also how complicated calcs might get. Perhaps the type of calcs will be as you suggested similar to shadow maps (or shadow volumes?) But how will this fare with hundreds/thousands of ‘bullets’, beams, missiles, bomb blasts and drones going everywhere in a battle? Eve’s damage & hit calcs are currently done on the Eve server side (not on client side) So the servers will have to handle all this calcs for everyone… The poor server hamsters will run away! And if they move the calcs to client side my poor computer will melt I’m sure :slight_smile:

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I never said it wasn’t possible. After all, what do all FPS’s rely on?

Less than you might think, space your fleet out a little bit and you’d be amazed how much of the space around you isn’t filled with friendlies. TiDi would make it easier to miss their own fleet dude.

As the two methods i suggested, no more complicated than that. shadow maps are pretty efficient, but again, cue the billion hitbox complaints. GPU’s are basically designed to do trigonometry, it wouldn’t hurt a great deal. Poor for the game in general imho though.

13

I’m not sure I agree with it. Theoretically it might work if each and everyone in fleet has lots of time to manually positions their ships carefully and sits still, no-one launches drones, and the enemies stays perfectly in line with the gaps in your fleet and sits still to be shot.

In practice however there are lots of things happening in fleets. Very few fleets people just sit still - they move around a lot. They orbit each other, try to keep in range, burn towards enemies, or away from them. And the drones just do their own thing flying in every direction and orbiting their targets. And the same happens on the enemy’s side. They move around too, and they launch drones too. People’s trajectories change unexpectedly as they bump each other. And precise position becomes even more difficult because for big fights people often are zoomed out to get a better tactical overview of the battlefield. I would like to see how excessive friendly fire can be avoided in this situation.

There is a old game called X Beyond the Frontier with a few sequels. Nice series of games. But it illustrated what happens when all weapons have collision detection. Launch a few capital ships with groups of escort fighters. Then sit back and watch the chaos when an enemy flies through… You will loose a lot of your own ships to friendly fire. Half the other ships in the area will get mad and go red and attack you, because you ships accidentally hit them… It is one of the reasons why people go and sit in a completely different system from their big fleets especially if they will use SETA to accelerate the time. If they stay in the same system it often becomes a big disaster because of collision detection. That is why they go to another system because the collision detection is switched off for remote systems, and thus their remote fleets don’t hit each other and everyone else.

I see that you mean if everything happens slower it gives more time to position ships. But I’m speaking about heavy TiDi when there are lots of ships ongrid. Updates are slowed down and delayed. You see ships and their positions and movements long after it has actually happened. Some ships take a while to even show up visually and on the overview. I’m not sure how it will be easier to miss shooting the wrong ships if you cannot even see everyone, and if the positions you see are ‘outdated’.

14

Yes GPU’s can be used to calculate it. But it causes a contradiction with what you said before, because it would be done client side.:

I agree with this. I don’t want the calcs client side, which means the GPU’s are not the answer. I prefer most of the Eve calculations to stay server side, as they are currently.

This is one thing I do agree with you about.

15

Python and the math that would take aren’t a good match.

The computer scientists capable of that low level stuff are probably rare and expensive.

That is also something that might be offloaded to graphics processors, but that too would require some very heavy and rare talent.

Spheres in unobstructed 3d space is what we’re going to have for a while.

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Again, first person shooters function just fine.

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When I can be bothered I’ll show you some maths, why spreading out just a little will drastically reduce your chances of hitting your own fleet.

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FPS games are designed from the ground up to have this. Eve hardly even monitors what way your ship is pointing.

Also most of the blockages in a FPS are fixed position objects, not a asteroid field full of moving objects.

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EVE is not a game where players are manually shooting. Instead, we give our ships the command to aim, track and shoot.

Aiming and objects obstructing line of sight may work well in a fast paced dogfight game where players themselves are aiming. But in a slow tick-based game where players have zero control over their aim makes little sense, even if it were mechanically feasible.

It would be yet another factor in an already complex combat system full of other similar factors like tracking, falloff, velocity and explosion radius that already affect our weapons. However, unlike the other combat factors that players have control over with fitting options and flight command options, players would have very little control over obstructing lines and as result this additional game mechanic would be irrelevant at best, frustrating misses at worst.

In small fights a pilot might be able to work around this feature, but fleet combat will become downright unplayable.

No support.

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The only real issue I have with this concept is the cost in performance (people have mentioned the 20 year old code already,) and the issue with concord.

The performance issue will be solved in time as new tech becomes available and the old code is replaced with better performing software.

The highsec issue could be worked around by allowing anyone within the fleet of the owner of a mission site to attack any players within a certain distance of that mission beacon without penalty (including no limited pvp flag.) A similar tactic could be taken for war decs. Free fire around corporation stations, but if you attack things in other locations, such as the jita undock, you’re taking risks with your life.

Of course, this would also make things like incursion systems, ded pockets, and cosmic signatures effectively pvp zones. So you wont get support for this “feature” from the people who engage with these activities in highsec.

Likely the easiest thing to do for highsec, would be to just turn collision off. Make up some lore bs about entropic phasing preventing collision damage from unintended targets and then disable smartbombs in highsec as well.

As for the other issues brought forward, such as:

Instead of focusing on shooting the enemies you would have to focus on not shooting your allies.

This is just a pure win to me. Not only does it make the experience more engaging, it will encourage the fights to spread out more. Personally, I would also add ship collision damage to the mix (outside of highsec, or at least outside of highsec station radius) in order to encourage people to fly their own ships instead of anchoring up.

In PVE it make it more likely to shoot triggers and pull the wrong waves.

This is also not a serious problem. PVE is already far to formulaic, so anything that can add some dynamic randomness to the mix is a good thing in my book.

Or accidentally shoot your own wrecks and loose your loot or a mission critical item.

Get gud?

Because no matter how good you position your ship - your guns track and cycle on their own,

You can actually manually fire your guns. It usually lowers your dps, however people who pvp with high alpha, low tracking, long cool-down guns will use this method to get the most out of their ship.

your missiles will fly their own path to targets… And then there are the ‘smart’ AI control of your drones in Eve, hehe.

I would just chalk these up to being downsides of that sort of weapon system.

It would complicate area of affect modules and weapons. Do objects/ships that are in the way block boosts? (for that matter will it block remote repairs?) What about stealth bombers with bombs? I wonder how complicated the bomb and smartbomb blast geometry and damage calculation will get.

Yes. The ideal for this sort of idea would be to be able to block damage by having an object between the weapon and the “target.” Obviously that would be resource intensive, but in order for the concept to be a realistic possibility of implementation, we would have to assume the hardware and software were available for the concept to come to fruition.